The FSF Award for Projects of Social Benefit is presented annually to a project that intentionally and significantly benefits society by applying free software, or the ideas of the free software movement, in a project that intentionally and significantly benefits society in other aspects of life.

Since its launch in 2001, Creative Commons has worked to foster a growing body of creative, educational and scientific works that can be shared and built upon by others. Creative Commons has also worked to raise awareness of the harm inflicted by increasingly restrictive copyright regimes.

Creative Commons vice president Mike Linksvayer accepted the award saying, “It’s an incredible honor. Creative Commons should be giving an award to the Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallman, because what Creative Commons is doing would not be possible without them.”

Congratulations also to Wietse Venema, honored with the Award for the Advancement of Free Software for his “significant and wide-ranging technical contributions to network security, and his creation of the Postfix email server.”

FSF president Stallman presented a plaque by artist Lincoln Read commemorating the award to Creative Commons.

It is worth noting that the FSF Social Benefit Award’s 2005 and 2007 winners are Wikipedia and Groklaw both because it is tremendous to be in their company and as the former is in the process of migrating to a CC BY-SA license (thanks in large part to the FSF) and the latter publishes under a CC BY-NC-ND license.

Only last December CC was honored to receive an award from another of computing’s most significant pioneers, Doug Engelbart.

I hereby give Sita Sings the Blues to you. Like all culture, it belongs to you already, but I am making it explicit with a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License. Please distribute, copy, share, archive, and show Sita Sings the Blues. From the shared culture it came, and back into the shared culture it goes.

You don’t need my permission to copy, share, publish, archive, show, sell, broadcast, or remix Sita Sings the Blues. Conventional wisdom urges me to demand payment for every use of the film, but then how would people without money get to see it? How widely would the film be disseminated if it were limited by permission and fees? Control offers a false sense of security. The only real security I have is trusting you, trusting culture, and trusting freedom. …

The potential migration of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects to using CC BY-SA as their primary content license has spurred some interesting discussions about attribution — how to give credit for a massively collaborative work in a variety of mediums? This question is relevant regardless of migration, but clearly migration has prompted the discussion and provides an opportunity to progress best practices.

Erik Möller has posted results of a survey run on the English and German Wikipedias regarding how contributors feel about what constitutes appropriate credit for using Wikipedia content. Raw survey data is available for independent analysis.

Unsurprisingly (at least in hindsight), attribution via linking to the article used was most popular, while not giving credit at all was least popular. Here’s the Condorcet ranking, provided by Robert Rohde:

1) Link to the article must be given.
2) Collective credit (e.g. Wikipedia community).
3) Link to the version history must be given.
4) For online use: link. For other uses: full list of authors.
5) Full list of authors must always be copied.
6) No credit is needed.

Creative Commons had wikis in mind when we added attribution via link in version 2.5 of our licenses in 2005. If there are further changes we can make to address attribution and massively collaborative works, it is surely something we’ll want to look at in a future version of the CC licenses, regardless of Wikipedia migration, as wiki and wiki-like mechanisms will only grow in importance for the creation of free cultural works — though it will be very helpful to have the brainpower and experience of the Wikipedia community guiding such developments.

Correction 2009-03-11: We added attribution by link in version 2.0. The change in 2.5 did have wikis in mind, but was more subtle — allowing the licensor to designate that attribution should go to an entity such as a journal or wiki. Thanks to Anthony for prompting this correction on the Wikimedia Foundation discussion list.

Clivir, a learning community site that allows users to post lessons of any and all types, just added support for CC licensing. The site already has amassed a large amount of teachable knowledge and by adding CC licensing options Clivir are giving users the ability to keep this knowledge open, shareable, and reusable (depending on which license is indicated).

Clivir have a released all of their own lessons under a CC BY-SA license, setting a strong example for the rest of their community to follow suit. While the ability to filter lessons by license choice is unfortunately not available yet, it is still great to see CC licenses integrated into communities like Clivir that pride group collaboration and collective knowledge.

The Legal Education Commons launched yesterday with open access to over 700,000 federal court decisions. The LEC is an “open, searchable collection of resources designed specifically for use in legal education.” It is made possible by a collaboration between the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) and Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. From the press release:

“All teachers of law have materials and notes they use in teaching,” says John Mayer, CALI Executive Director. “Many freely share their materials with colleagues, but there has never been a singular searchable, taggable space to serve that function for the entire legal academy,” he explains, “until now.”
…

While the LEC opens with an extensive collection of court cases and images, it can expand its collection of resources only through contributions and donations from the legal education community.

CALI implores faculty and staff at CALI member schools to share any files from personal collections that may facilitate learning amongst the legal education community. “Especially as we increasingly garner more participation and sharing from legal educators,” says Mr. Mayer, “the Legal Education Commons will be a great, non-commercial tool for those who are both teaching and learning the law.”

All material in the Legal Education Commons is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike license (CC BY-SA), making it interoperable with a great deal of other open educational resources.

MixedInk is a recently launched service that allows large groups of people to collaboratively work on a single document together online. While many sites of this nature exist, MixedInk seems to be the first to focus on large group collaboration and does so in a unique manner. MixedInk’s submission system is based on a Digg-like voting procedure in which users vote for their favorite draft – the final draft is therefore dynamic and can shift over time if a better draft is decided upon by the community.

MixedInk keeps this type of collaboration open and legally sound by requiring any documents created on the site to be released under a CC BY-SA license. This serves a practical purpose – the articles written offer no restrictions in regards to quoting or editing as long as the original author is credited – and also serves the auxiliary purpose of keeping the MixedInk community open and free, ensuring there are no legal barriers for creating the best content possible. There are already some interesting examples of how this system can be put to use, most notably Slate’s community written Inaugural Address where individuals can contribute and vote for the Inaguration Speech they would most like to hear President-Elect Barack Obama give this coming Tuesday. The top-rated address will be published at Slate.com on inauguration day.

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The source files have been seeded for Valkaama, a fresh collaborative “open source movie”, filmed in Krakow, Poland. Director Tim Baumann intends to complete the post-production of the full feature movie publicly, with the help of volunteers both amateur and professional:

Here all available media sources are published in order to give you the chance to build upon them. If you want to participate in this project, by helping finishing the movie, creating remixes, making a new trailer or if you want to publish anything else here which is related to Valkaama, please get in touch with us.

Valkaama (trailer) is a drama set in Sweden and Finland and produced by drama school students and amateurs in and around Krakow. It tells the story of two disparate young men, each seeking his fortune, thrown together by fate to travel to “Valkaama”. As their paths cross, they do not realize how much of their journey has already been determined by their pasts.

Open Source and Open Content movies are still a rarity. Valkaama is one of the first movies not only to be distributed freely, but also to guarantee free access to all source data used and created during the production process. The project uses CC BY-SA 3.0 licenses to guarantee very flexible use and reuse of the produced material. Almost every text, picture and video, as well as all downloadable media, is tagged with a respective license. In some cases the licenses are included in the media files themselves.

Wikipedia began 8 years agotoday and now exists in 265(!) languages with over 10 million articles among them. In those 8 years Wikipedia has grown from an outlandish dream and into a reality far more outlandish than the original dream — it now seems silly to compare Wikipedia to past encyclopedias, for while Wikipedia and sibling sites run by the Wikimedia Foundation are encylopedic in nature, they are 1,000 times more useful than anything previously conceived as an encyclopedia. Happy birthday and congratulations!

For context, we celebrated Mozilla’s 10th birthday last April and the GNU project’s 25th last September. It’s very difficult to draw comparisons, but the longevity of the free software movement and the relatively recent massive success of Wikipedia should inspire and humble the rest of the free culture and related movements.

The digital arts organization folly has joined forces Lancashire County Council to commission art for the cities, towns, and villages of the Northwest England county. From the call for proposals:

This “Digital Engagement Commission” will question the role of digital arts and its meaning and benefits for audiences in Lancashire – people who live or work in the county, visitors and those who have an interest in engaging with it virtually.

… The artist will make the consultation process publicly visible in an engaging and creative online platform. The participatory consultation activities should take the form of both unique and engaging physical sessions and virtual engagement via the publicly accessible online platform. This platform could be developed especially by the artist or could make use of existing social networks. Any software developed for the project would be licensed under the latest general public license and any other works developed as part of the project would be licensed under creative commons attributions share alike. (emphasis added)

The aptly named Funny or Die comedy community has launched a competition with the free on-line screen writing software site Zhura. All contributions must be licensed under our copyleft license, Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA) so that Funny or Die’s producers can create the shows freely. Consequently, Funny or Die episodes based on submissions to the competition will be reciprocally licensed under BY-SA as well:

Q. What if I don’t want anyone to touch my script?
A. In order to be considered by the head writers for production, your script MUST carry the BY-SA Creative Commons License. This does two things: It lets Funny Or Die UK produce your sketch and it allows Zhura members (and Funny or Die UK head writers) edit your script as necessary to make it better (sorry).